Wednesday, August 3, 2011

I use to have an extension installed in my Chrome browser called Sexy Undo Close Tab, that allowed me to quickly recover a closed tab. The extension also served as a simple history browser for the most recent pages. I made a passing reference to this extension in one of my previous articles about Chrome extensions for managing tabs. Later, I switched to the light weight version of this extension - Sexy History Viewer Lite – by the same developer.

Chrome’s own history viewer - chrome://history is not bad either, but I often find myself using it’s smarter version chrome://history2/. The second version displays the domain along with the page title that makes locating pages easier. There are a few other extensions, mostly just shortcuts to the default Chrome history page.

Now Chrome’s history viewer is nice, but it’s not consistent in appearance with Chrome’s option pages. Better History in a new Chrome extension that fixes this.

With Better History installed, the browser’s history page sports a better look. The sidebar displays three links for browsing history of ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Past 7 days’, and a search box. The wider panel on right shows the history organized by time you visited the pages.

For those looking for some sort of time period filter can use the History Calendar extension. History Calendar adds a calendar to the history page that allows you to view history by a specific date. A click and out pops a calendar. You can even view history between two specific dates. History Calendar also makes it possible to limit your searches for the pre-selected time interval.

History Calendar also includes a fancy history statistics tool that can draw pie charts of your top visited pages and graph your browsing activity.